Nazi Party.

26-04-2021

gestapo

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party ( abbreviated NSDAP), was a political party in Germany that was active between 1920 and 1945 and practiced the ideology of Nazism . Its precursor, the German Workers’s Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; DAP) , existed from 1919 to 1920.

The party emerged from the German nationalist, racist and populist Freikorps  paramilitary culture, which fought against the communist uprisings in post-World War I Germany. The party was created as a means to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism.Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti-big business, anti- bourgeois and anti-capitalist rhetoric, although such aspects were later downplayed in order to gain the support of industrial entities, and in the 1930s the party’s focus shifted to anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist themes.

Rasiscm was central to Nazism. The Nazis propagated the idea of a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft). Their aim was to unite “racially desirable” Germans as national comrades, while excluding those deemed either to be political dissidents, physically or intellectually inferior, or of a foreign race. The Nazis sought to improve the stock of the Germanic people through racial purity and eugenics, broad social welfare programs, and a collective subordination of individual rights, which could be sacrificed for the good of the state and the “Aryan master race” . To maintain the supposed purity and strength of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to extreminate Jews, Slavs, Romani , and the physically and mentally handicapped. They imposed exclusionary segregation on homosexuals , Africans, Jehovahs’s Witnesses, and political opponents. The persecution reached its climax when the party-controlled German state organized the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews and five million people from the other targeted groups, in what has become known as the Holocaust .

The party’s leader since 1921, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg on 30 January 1933. Hitler rapidly established a totalitarian regime known as the Third Reich . Following the defeat of the Third Reich at the conclusion of World War II in Europe, the party was “declared to be illegal” by the Allied powers, who carried out denaziification in the years after the war.

World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history. An estimated total of 70–85 million people perished, or about 3% of the 1940 world population (est. 2.3 billion). Deaths directly caused by the war (including military and civilians fatalities) are estimated at 50–56 million, with an additional estimated 19–28 million deaths from war-related disease and famine. Civilian deaths totaled 50–55 million. Military deaths from all causes totaled 21–25 million, including deaths in captivity of about 5 million prisoners of war. More than half of the total number of casualties are accounted for by the dead of the Republic of China and of the Soviet Union. The tables below give a detailed country-by-country count of human losses. Statistics on the number of military wounded are included whenever available.

Recent historical scholarship has shed new light on the topic of Second World War casualties. Research in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union has caused a revision of estimates of Soviet World War II fatalities. According to Russian government figures, USSR losses within postwar borders now stand at 26.6 million, including 8 to 9 million due to famine and disease.In August 2009 the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) researchers estimated Poland’s dead at between 5.6 and 5.8 million. Historian Rüdiger Overmans of the Military History Research Office (Germany) published a study in 2000 that estimated the German military dead and missing at 5.3 million, including 900,000 men conscripted from outside of Germany’s 1937 borders, in Austria, and in east-central Europe. The Red Army claimed responsibility for the majority of Wehrmacht casualties during World War II. The People’s Republic of China puts its war dead at 20 million, while the Japanese government puts its casualties due to the war at 3.1 million.